 |
Energy Data Storage
2010
by SMi Group
November
3 - 4, Kensington, London |
This new event
will form a platform for the
energy sector to discuss and compare their
unique digital data storage needs. | | |
| . |
Foremay describes secure
erase options for SSDs
Editor:- August 20, 2010 - Foremay's CTO, Jack
Winters presented a paper -
Secure Erase
Options for SSDs (pdf) - at the recent Flash Memory Summit.
The
paper describes the need for
SSD data purge and
the 3 techniques which the company supports in its Avalanche Secure Erase
Suite.
"In a regular
SSD, deleting a file only
removes its name from the directory or file table. User data remains until
overwritten by new data. Even reformatting the SSD leaves data intact,"
said Jack Winters, CTO of Foremay, during the Flash Security workshop. "The
Avalanche Secure Erase Suite employs various technologies to overwrite or
destroy all user data in allocated blocks and file tables, as well as data in
reallocated defective blocks."
...read the
article (pdf)
Editor's comments:- other hardware data
destruction technologies for SSDs are also available from
other vendors.
SSD Bookmarks - from SandForce's CEO
Editor:-
July 14, 2010 - StorageSearch.com
today published
SSD Bookmarks
- suggested by Michael Raam,
CEO SandForce.
It
seems like nearly everyone in the
SSD industry wants to know
what SandForce is doing and thinking.
Michael Raam's suggestions
include some great SSD resources which I had never seen before - which is why
the SSD Bookmarks
Series was created.
Do you want to understand more about the
issues that drive SandForce's thinking? If so - read the article
survey shows most users think they can't afford zero loss disaster
recovery
Editor:- June 9, 2010 - Axxana today
published
findings from a survey it funded to understand the role that
cost plays in
inhibiting user adoption of zero data loss disaster recovery solutions
such as its own SSD based solutions.
'This survey has really shown
how today's end users still feel that eliminating data loss though a disaster
recovery strategy is still out of their budget,' said Eli Efrat, Axxana's CEO.
'Although cost is still an important consideration, the results support our
strategy and I am confident that a year from now solutions such as our Phoenix
System will have a much bigger foothold in the market because they make zero
data loss DR an affordable option.'
SSD Backup
Will hybrid SSD/HDD products succeed?
Editor:- May
14, 2010 - a new article in
TheRegister.co.uk
discusses prospects for the
hybrid SSD/HDD
market and SSD ASAPs.
It
arose when I was having a discussion with their experienced storage
commentator Chris
Mellor. He asked what I thought about a recent web posting that
Toshiba might be thinking
of new hybrid SSD products.
As readers know I always have an opinion
about everything - but as I thought the Toshiba idea was not a very good one -
I didn't want to waste my time writing about it. Chris asked why I thought
that - and as a result he has written a much better article than I would have
done myself anyway. ...read the
article
DCIG publishes buyers guide - midrange storage array market
Editor:-
May 11, 2010 - DCIG
has published the
DCIG Midrange Array
Buyer's Guide (100+ pages) which contains product information on over 70
different midrange arrays from 20 storage providers.
DCIG says the
guide is intended to narrow down the playing field to develop a list of
competitive products that have comparable features to meet specific application
or business needs. Developed to be the go-to resource for IT professionals, the
guide provides direct comparisons of storage systems classified as midrange
arrays and delivers insight into the range of offerings available on the market.
New for 2010, the DCIG Midrange Array Buyer's Guide provides product
comparisons among the widest range of storage array options and identifies the
winners and losers across five categories, including FC/iSCSI,
FC only,
iSCSI only, hardware and
software.
Pricing ranges from $5,000 for 1 print copy - upto $20,000 which
includes:- internal distribution, 1 hour of analyst debriefing and marketing
citation rights.
Nimbus nixes STEC SAS SSD costs in new iSCSI rackmount
Editor:-
April 26, 2010 - Nimbus
Data Systems today
launched
its S-class
storage system - a 2U 10GbE rackmount SSD with 24 hot swappable
internal 6Gbps SAS
flash SSD blades in an 80W power footprint offering 5TB protected capacity for
$39,995.
Powered by Nimbus' HALO storage OS the systems support
iSCSI, NFS, and CIFS
protocols and provide inline
deduplication
(typically 10 to 1), continuous local and remote replication capability
in-the-box at no additional cost. Data protection inside the box ensures that no
data is lost even with 2 simultaneous blade faults.
Editor's
comments:- there has been a lack of market leadership in the
NAS compatible
rackmount SSD
market. This new product from Nimbus shows what can be achieved with a true
bottom up enterprise design - in the same way that for
FC SAN connected
applications you'd look at systems from
Texas Memory Systems
and in the PCIe
connected rackmount SSD market you'd look at
NextIO or at
Violin Memory.
I spoke at length to Nimbus's CEO, Thomas Isakovich - about the new
systems. He's been a network storage OS pioneer for 10 years (prior to Nimbus
he founded
TrueSAN)
so I joked that - unlike many new SSD companies - at least this product wouldn't
be surprised by applications doing the wrong type of R/W IOPS (different to those
encountered in benchmark suites).
The 1st question I asked was
about the storage blades. I had already guessed (and he confirmed) the interface
was SAS. But the
surprise came when I asked whose
SSDs was he using?
Isakovich
said Nimbus makes its own SSDs - and that while the company was talking to many
SSD controller
suppliers - it planned from the outset to change these suppliers for other best
of breed alternatives as the market evolved. In this respect - Nimbus is
different to most others in the NAS SSD space - because the company supplies the
whole software stack from the choice of silicon up through the OS and into the
network. (Editor's note:- in contrast competitor
WhipTail Technologies'
product is a complex integrated bundle which uses 3rd party COTS
2.5" SSDs,
licenses the flash write attenuation software from
EasyCo and licenses
dedupe technology from Exar.)
I asked Isakovich does Nimbus use SLC or MLC? - he said the internal
flash is Micron's
"enterprise
grade MLC" - which has 6x the
endurance of
standard MLC.
He explained that Nimbus is aiming to offer a
competitively priced product (2.5TB model costs $24,995) but unlike other
vendors they decided not to offer separate
MLC or SLC
versions. The argument being that once you sold a system to a customer - let's
say a low cost MLC SSD for video streaming - you couldn't be sure that the
customer might not redeploy that same system into a different application
accelerating their database (which needs higher endurance). His thinking seems
to be that once the SSD rack is out in the wild of the enterprise environment -
it has to be tough enough to handle ALL enterprise applications.
The
flash systems include 28%
over-provisioning
and write attenuation.
I asked about the size of the RAM cache -
Isakovich said it's 48GB which puts it in the
fat flash SSD
class. Users do have options on how they can deploy this to tweak performance.
Unlike SSD ASAPs -
which are designed to accelerate
hard disk arrays - the
name of the game with the new Nimbus product line is to make it attractive for
users to place all their critical
IOPS
intensive data into SSD.
And with this new product Nimbus is saying -
they like the flexibility and features of
SAS SSDs - but that
doesn't mean to say the market has to pay
STEC or
Pliant prices. |
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| SSD Pricing -
where does all the money go? |
SSDs are among the most
expensive computer hardware products you will ever buy.
Understanding
the factors which determine SSD costs is often a confusing and irritating
process... |
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...not made any easier when
market prices for identical capacity SSDs can vary more than 100x to 1!
Why is that? ...read
the article | | | |
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| What's the
best / cheapest - PC SSD? |
Editor:- I often get emails
from readers which ask the above question.
An article on
StorageSearch.com - called
What's the best
/ cheapest PC SSD? - is my attempt to create a simple FAQs page - which
answers the question... |
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...of why I can't answer
your question - and follows on to pose some probing questions which you
can ask yourself. ...read the article | | | |
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